Haunted History of Greenwich: Artists In a Haunted House (1900)

 

The New York Times of the 9th of December 1900 tells a good good ghost story. The scene is laid in the North Mianus neighborhood of Greenwich, Connecticut, in a house within sight of a mansion belonging to Henry O. Havemeyer. 

Four Men Defy Ghosts Which Are Said to Appear Nightly.

Special to The New York Times

GREENWICH, Conn., Dec. 8, 1900

Four artists are living in a haunted house at North Mianus, within sight of Henry O. Havemeyer's mansion, defying ghosts which are said to appear nightly. 

They are Louis Loeb and Albert Sterner, illustrators; Ernest Benson, water colorist watercolorist, and W. G. Schneider, miniaturist. 

They have lived in the same house for nearly six months, and yet their nerves are steady and the work they produce bears no suggestion of the price of  toil is.

The house is a three-story farmhouse with awning, with a stone wall in front, and near it an old-fashioned well sweep. The main house is double, with rooms on each side of a broad hall.

In one of the rear rooms years ago a man named Carpenter cut his throat with a razor. He had become doubled up with rheumatism in his old age, and, being without relatives, committed suicide in despair. 

The blood stains remain on the floor to this day and no amount of scrubbing will remove them.

After his death the house was unoccupied until the artists moved in last Summer and get up their studio therein. 

No ghost talk could scare them, they said, and from their silence since it is judged that they have not seen many spirits from the other world.

The story told by North Mianusites is that night after night at a certain hour there comes stealing across the threshold of the door the shadowy form of an old man, and that he re-enacts the gory scene, witnessed only by the moon peeping at the windows.

There are those who profess  to have seen the ghostlike form, and others who express their doubts.

The artists have little company to annoy them, and so look upon the story of ghosts a blessing in disguise.

Source: New York Times. December 9, 1900. Page 1.

Transcribed by Jeffrey Bingham Mead